Abstract
As Odum (1971a) succinctly put it,
The transfer of food energy from the source in plants through a series of organisms, with repeated eating and being eaten, is referred to as a food chain. At each transfer a large proportion, 80 to 90 percent, of the potential energy is lost as heat. Therefore the number of ‘links’ in a sequence is limited, usually four or five ... The number of consumers that can be supported by a given primary production output very much depends on the length of the food chain; each link in the chain decreases the available energy by about one order of magnitude.
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Pimm, S.L. (1988). Energy Flow and Trophic Structure. In: Pomeroy, L.R., Alberts, J.J. (eds) Concepts of Ecosystem Ecology. Ecological Studies, vol 67. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3842-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3842-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-8373-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-3842-3
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